[self-interest] Quiet in Self land?

Russell Allen mail at russell-allen.com
Tue Sep 16 09:34:57 UTC 2014


On 16 Sep 2014, at 5:17 pm, Casey Ransberger casey.obrien.r at gmail.com [self-interest] <self-interest at yahoogroups.com> wrote:

> Web development framework. Okay, so that isn't really fun at all, but it *might* create some new interest in the project.
We now have an almost web server, which I'm running selflangauge.org on behind nginx

For the simple sites I've written most web frameworks seem weirdly complex to me, but it's not my area so I assume they are useful for people who need them.

> Mother of Stupid Ideas: do a web browser and fire 90% of the operating system, which is nowadays a life support system for a web browser anyway. I've been wanting to do this in Squeak since I arrived unwashed at the threshold of the mysteries of the message send. In Self, though, one of the ideas I had could really work better than in any other system presently: one could use direct, live manipulation of the morphs that comprise a web page to edit the actual page in a WYSIWYG fashion, and then use a variant of the object transporter, maybe with some parsing expression grammar sauce, to idea send a message which makes the page recursively render itself as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It's like FrontPage, but without all of the suck! Of course, we'd need recruits, so...

Oh that's easy. Write a javascript->self translator, run webkit through emscripten and Bob's your uncle :p

> Bad idea from professional experience: make it social. In the run up to Facebook eclipsing everything righteous and humane, we got a lot of play just by taking an existing thing and adding social/game features. GitHub has been enormously successful bringing this stuff into the programming world. It seems like the main problem with Self is that almost no one (except Smalltalk programmers and professional VM hackers) has even heard of it. Sticking a viralish microblogging widget into the image and maybe some instant messaging stuff alone could do wonders with regard to snaring bright, malleable minds to help build the future.

The ability to share a Self screen is really a hidden superpower. We just need to disentangle it from X Windows.

> Idea for which I will not hold any resentment when rotten tomatoes are thrown at me: I wish Self was more portable. I wish that all the brilliant, living people who made real live object systems go fast could combine forces.
> 
> CASEY
> (ducks slightly)
> 
> AUDIENCE
> (nervous silence)
> 
> CASEY
> What if we retargeted Self to run above the Cog/Spur variant of the Squeak VM, and then focused some effort on implementing the necessary bits on ARM and…
> 
> AUDIENCE, THROWING ROTTEN TOMATOES
> Noooooooeeess!
> 
> CASEY
> (drowns to death in tomato juice)

Boo! Hiss! 

Actually not a bad idea if we could adjust the Cog JIT to inline getters and setters, otherwise I'm guessing it would be too slow?

:) R
> 
> 

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